


Troubled Water | As In, Bridge Over

by tomato_greens



Category: Grace and Frankie (TV)
Genre: F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-06
Updated: 2018-10-06
Packaged: 2019-07-25 19:48:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16204454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tomato_greens/pseuds/tomato_greens
Summary: Listen, it’s the seventies.





	Troubled Water | As In, Bridge Over

**Author's Note:**

> 1) That New York set in “The Hinge” doesn’t really look like anywhere in New York I’ve ever been, so I somewhat arbitrarily made Frankie from Crown Heights for reasons I can expand upon if you want to know them.
> 
> 2) I wrote this to chill out and stop experimenting but then...this happened, so please forgive me. I tried to make the layout fairly responsive and readable. If you are reading on a phone, try reading with your phone in landscape.

By Stamford standards, Grace is an old maid at twenty-five, but the silk blouse of independence feels delicious on her skin. Stamford is to Stanford as her parents’ little ranch is to her uncle’s gracious Greek revival: threateningly desirable. As a sales associate in smart lapels, no one has to know she went to UConn instead of Yale, or that, despite her protestations and her diligent applications of Nair, she didn’t actually want to get her MRS along with her B.A. “No, Mom, I’m not lonely at all,” she says, admiring the phone cord wrapped around her ring finger.  |  They spent so many years fucking the man it shouldn’t have been a surprise when Sol took it too far; Sol always takes it too far. As a quirk it was lovable until the afterquakes take out Frankie’s legs and leave her, cleaving, on the carpet they bought together when the kids were small. Trimmed of a dirty thirty years by Grace’s kitchen scissors at least the carpet looks fly. Flecked with Pacific blue. Frankie closes her eyes and sinks into the floor and bursts out again above the water a hollow-boned creature—a laughing gull, a thin black stripe alone.   
---|---  
Frankie goes by Frances when she gets out of Dodge, which is to say, Crown Heights. In fact she tries Kansas on for size; it doesn’t fit, so she follows a guru into a sweat lodge and out again into a desert, where she throws her shoe at his terrible grasping hands and books it until she can see the ocean again. Pacific—from Latin, _pax._ It’s the wrong ocean, but it fits her better than motherfucking Kansas did. Here, alone by choice instead of through absence, she can say _motherfucking_ as often as she wants. Floating, she finds Frankie again.  |  Even martinis at their best come with two olives; what is Grace supposed to do now she’s alone in the pits? Though: a bed uncreased by Robert’s resentful restlessness is a welcome discovery, as are mornings unselfconsciously her own once she realizes Frankie is happiest oblivious. Grace has always thought her body a burden but she finds its boundaries become her once she starts to pay attention to the way they retract and expand in response, a buoyancy she’s never felt. It’d always been more about the house than the beach. She’s spent her whole life avoiding too much salt.   
It’s desperation, all right, but it’s not the sting of the desire: Grace lets herself get set up with another ex-East Coaster just to meet someone else who doesn’t take the sunshine as a God-given right. They are both terribly charming, and they both have overbearing mothers, which seems as serious a foundation as the creams Grace has taken to brewing in her bathroom. At the end of the evening, Robert kisses her, a ridiculous kiss like he learned the moves from studying Cary Grant in a movie palace when he was five. Who didn’t love a move like that? | A life Vybrantly lived is a life worth the effort, or so Frankie tells anyone who will listen. A little yam, some good vibes, and she barely misses Sol (Jacob, a man of filmic kisses and another heart-giving entirely, she refuses to consider). The truth Vybrant proves is that despite the dozens of spelling bees they watched together Sol never cared about the linguistics of the whole affair. He was by birth a Babeler, a man of a careless tongue. Together they’d reached a thousand revelations, but after this she knows he can never love her as she loves herself.   
The problem is that Frankie now only has one shoe, and therefore “only two souls where I should have three,” she explains to a man at a music festival, a man apparently gifted by birth with the eyebrows of God. “I could be your third,” says the man. “Oh, no thanks, I’ve done enough threeways for a while,” says Frankie politely. “It was a joke,” says the man. “Ha ha,” says Frankie, less politely. “My name’s Sol,” says the man. “Oh!” says Frankie, who in migrating south for the winter after Robin’s death had become a great believer in signs.  | Grace has never built or burned a bridge in her life. She’s not one for engineering. Having become an island, though, she discovers the need for infrastructure: her daughters transformed by these hard-hitting years into pillars, and no longer ones of salt. Hell, why not the grandkids and the grand dog too? Grace always thought of bridges as a brittle proposition, precarious from far away and ugly flawed rumbling things as you drive over them. This is how they differ, Grace thinks: Frankie will build one to anywhere and out of anything. Chewed up straws, thumb tacks. Empty wine glasses.   
The wedding is black-tie so black it’s nearly white—well-attended, well-appointed, well-heeled—when they’ve been chased into the rented cherry Cadillac by the crowd, Grace collapses into the corner of the backseat. “You look like a cream puff,” says Robert. In punishment for the cake she ate, Grace’s girdle won’t permit her to respond. She allows herself to kick a four-inch white satin pump into the well beneath the driver’s seat. “Oh my God, what is that?” Robert asks, picking up her foot and peering at the blood blister blackening the back of her Achilles. “‘Pain is beauty, beauty, pain,’” Grace quotes.  | Of course it was there all along, just like Sol’s was, a Spot the Difference Frankie can’t solve until she scrapes away a little more of the palimpsest—marriage, motherhood, marijuana—and examines the whole of it up on a canvas. Her favorite medium is intuition, but like all the best strengths it is also her Achilles heel. It doesn’t come until she’s got a box cutter in hand, razoring the painting down to the middle to see what’s inside the latest vagina she’s painted. A frame. The edge of the canvas. Her hand. The ubiquitous, miraculous transformation from O to CO2.   
Wreathed in flowers and bangles, Frankie imagines herself a martyr before she snaps out of it and huffs her way through the most beautiful wedding the newly dawned Age of Aquarius has ever seen. She knows the fjords of loss like she knows the back of Sol’s hand when he rests it on her sternum. The wedding, unearthquaked, is in a meadow, or maybe Meadow just lent them her record player so they could dance to Simon and Garfunkel. Okay, Frankie’s fresh out of a bridesmaid. And? Change is constant, baby. Dance a little. Pass the joint. And the cake! | There’s plenty difficult about breaking into a business market, but Grace never had trouble understanding the role of the commodity. The subjectivity of the object is a subject she objectively knows a lot about—she’s made her name twice over on it, not to mention a total of two halves of two down payments. From one perspective the lost beach house was just an object filled with other objects. Yet parallax begs to differ. In the past seventy years, Grace has been subjected to a lot of bullshit, and circumstances have rarely been allowed to object. Time now, Frankie beside her, to start.   
| “Hello? Hello, you must be—” |    
---|---  
  | “I must, huh? How can you know the worth of a person just by looking, Miss Hot To Trot Starched Collar? Are you with the IRS?”  
“—Frankie. Robert told me you’d be here.” |    
  | “...Grace Hanson? You don’t look like you sound on the phone!”  
“Am I supposed to thank you for that?”  |    
  | “Your collar wasn’t so obviously popped over the landline.”  
“I’ll be sure to take that into consideration next time I pick up a phone. Speaking of, did you want me to call the IRS?” |    
  | “You don’t have to bother them on my account.”   
| 

**[SOLD.]**  
  
---  
  | “Who can we call?”   
“...The Ghostbusters?” |    
  | “I’m serious, Frances. I’m trying to think—there’s got to be a solution.”  
“I know.” |    
  | “This can’t just happen!”  
“I know.” |    
  | “God, Frankie, I refuse this. Refute it. _Repudiate_ it. All of the above.”   
“I know, but I—I don’t have an answer.” |    
   |    
  
**[The sea laps its hungry tongue. A lone gull shadows the sand and wings away again.]**  
  
“We’ll think of one, though. Won’t we?” |    
  | “Oh— _sweetheart_ —”


End file.
